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According to NPR, 43% of Americans support criminalizing gender-affirming care and 54% oppose it, whereas two years ago, 28% supported it and 65% opposed it. What caused the surge in opposition? Did people just not know what gender-affirming care was two years ago? Did they assume that psychological evaluations of trans kids were more thorough than they actually were?
I'd bet anything its the kids that moved the needle. Also the explosion of it, such that more people had proximate experience with how off the rails it's gotten. Schools socially transitioning children without telling their parents. The repeated lies about how "Kids below a certain age never receive cross sex hormones/double mastectomies/penectomies" and then just straight up seeing it happening. The obvious at the time and increasingly proven lies about how "hormone blockers are fully reversible". The constant mealy mouthed crocodile tears about how "Republicans are banning books!" because parents don't want books with graphic details about how to have gay sex in middle school libraries. Or books that say sex work is like any other kind of work, and a good way to pay for your hormones. The fact that increasingly Democrats and trans activist are messaging that they want to take away your children if you don't "affirm their identity".
It's just lies, lies and more lies the whole way down. People are given more reason to distrust trans activist every day.
This kind of political 'analysis' is omnipresent in normal politics spaces - "the other team are doing , it's lies all the way down, more and more people are leaving the democratic plantation / republican hate machine every day!" isn't really enlightening. What should 'banning books' have to do with puberty blockers? An even-handed attempt to articulate why a poll changed wouldn't exclusively be insults and exaggerated culture-war anecdotes.
What if he's just right, though? What if all of that is an honest-to-god explanation for the change in public approval? I undertsand we expect a level of charity, rigor, and definition for arguments in this space, but we are now talking about John Q Public "normies", and they are not beholden to any such considerations when they reach their verdicts, imperfect as they may be.
Maybe those seemingly disparate things are all sinking each other because they are not being offered piecemeal for individual assessment, but as a total package that needs to be accepted or rejected wholesale - an ultimatum I certainly didn't bring to the table, nor did most conservatives.
Sure, you and I could break it apart and evaluate the merits of any given piece as an intellectual exercise. But I don't live here on this forum. My online presence is spread across places and platforms beyond TheMotte, and I can see what an average person may be bombarded with just from opening a new tab in Microsoft Edge
If WhiningCoil is being uncharitable, perhaps it's because the population we're discussing (those switching from supporting to resisting GAC) have run out of charity. That's as real and honest an explanation as anything else.
Sure, partisan claims are sometimes correct, even in extreme forms. "THE RIVERS ARE BURNING" is dramatic, but that did contribute to the Clean Water Act. But if you want to understand 'why environmental regulation succeeded' - you want less of 'THE PEOPLES EYES HAVE OPENED TO THE DESTRUCTION WROUGHT ON MOTHER NATURE BY THE BRUTALITY OF INDUSTRY' and more 'environmental incidents increased in frequency from [number] to [larger number], the surplus left by technological development left enough slack to cut down on pollution without significantly reducing economic productivity, the environmental movement led by [list of people/organizations] grew in influence, something about changes in the dynamics of politics or the media'.
OP's list contains many claims about "lies" without clarifying who specifically is telling the lies, or who specifically is noticing them. Not distinguishing between relatively common phenomena (trans kids) and relatively rare phenomena ("Democrats and trans activist are messaging that they want to take away your children if you don't "affirm their identity""). And partisan non-sequiturs like "mealy mouthed crocodile tears about how "Republicans are banning books!" [...] about how to have gay sex in middle school libraries" and "books that say sex work is like any other kind of work, and a good way to pay for your hormones".
Even with mostly the same content, consider a post like "Parents noticed, in their childrens' schools, the quadrupling of the transgender child population in the past ten years. At the same time, social media, e.g. @LibsOfTiktok, drew attention to alarming situations - schools transitioning children secretly, teachers promoting trans issues in the classroom, and 'affirming a child's gender' being considered in a custody dispute. This intensified as it became another prong of the "anti-woke" right-left culture-war." Much better. Compare to OPO's "It's just lies, lies and more lies the whole way down" - which is neither true (lies are mixed with truths, as always) nor explanatory (plenty of culture war issues are similarly infested with lies, consider guns or immigration, and those aren't any less popular as a result).
Fair.
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